A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.

yelp-stickerYelp Announces A New ‘Revenue Estimator’ For Small Businesses (TechCrunch)
Yelp is announcing a new feature intended to highlight and quantify the value that the listing and review site provides for small businesses. The feature separates customer leads from page views — those leads can include things like bookmarking a Yelp business listing, mapping directions to the business, placing a phone call from the Yelp app, purchasing a Yelp deal, making an OpenTable reservation, and more.

DNAinfo’s NYC Schools Guide Shows Off ‘Network Effect’ (Street Fight)
Tom Grubisich: The neighborhood-centric news site has created a guide that lets users zoom in and out so they can get the nitty-gritty about specific schools and compare it to other schools throughout New York City. The way the design uses dots and arrows to retrieve many pages of articles is a singular achievement in user-friendliness.

Why the Collision of Big Data and Privacy Will Require a New Realpolitik (Paid Content)
People’s movements are highly predictable, researchers say, making it easy to identify most individuals from supposedly anonymized location datasets. As these datasets have valid uses, this is yet another reason why we need better regulation.

Pricing Engine Pools Data to Help VSBs Spend Wisely (Street Fight)
With legacy local media companies starting to scale marketing services products, startups now have an increasingly viable channel to manage and distribute marketing products for very small businesses (VSBs). Pricing Engine has built a paid search and display manager that uses collective knowledge to help the smallest businesses effectively buy ads online.

How Indoor Location Could Find Its Way into Apple Services (GigaOm)
It’s not totally clear what Apple wants with WifiSlam, but Apple has several services that would benefit from indoor positioning and location tech like small startup has been working on. While it’s not very likely to pop up in the next version of iOS, here are a couple of ideas to give an example of how Apple some day could integrate WifiSlam’s capabilities to augment or improve Apple services as they stand today.

Retail Brick-and-Mortar May Not Die Completely, But It’s Dying as We Know It (PandoDaily)
Sarah Lacy: You’d expect the traditional brick and mortar crowd to argue with Marc Andreessen. But the surprise is that the very ecommerce 2.0 leaders who are trying to take the medium further than the pre-Zappos generation could by replicating the browsing, brand, and enjoyment aspect of shopping online are the very ones who are arguing there’s still a place for brick and mortar.

Reviews, Recommendations Trump Other Media, Ads for Consumer Trust (Screenwerk)
Greg Sterling: A recent Forrester consumer survey shows a hierarchy of trust for various ad and media categories. Based on the totality of data, mobile ads tend to be more effective than traditional online ads — so we have something of a paradox: low trust but strong performance.

Geolocation Space Still Heating Up: TIBCO Acquires Digital Mapping Firm Maporama (TheNextWeb)
NASDAQ-listed provider of infrastructure software for enterprises TIBCO today announced that it has acquired Maporama, a privately-held provider of cloud-based location intelligence and geospatial analytics solutions. Maporama essentially allows companies to shorten decision-making cycles, optimize resource allocation and match supply with demand within the context of location.

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